Word: siliconized
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Inside the microprocessor package is the chip itself. This tiny square of silicon is packed with transistors that process instructions and data for the computer...
Grove and two colleagues he discovered in the company cafeteria--Bruce Deal and Edward Snow--then set out to make silicon usable. After months of work, they discovered that most of the MOS instability was traceable to an impurity--sodium--introduced when the chips were cured. Like a drop of lemon juice added to a cup of milk, sodium soured the precious semiconductors. The discovery solved a fundamental problem in materials science and set the stage for the semiconductor revolution. Grove and his team won one of the industry's most prestigious awards for the work. At home...
...Noyce was fed up with Fairchild. The firm was blowing up: engineers were leaving, top execs didn't understand the semi business, and science was being replaced by politics. Noyce phoned Arthur Rock, now the eminence grise of Silicon Valley investing, and told him that he and Moore wanted to start their own semiconductor company. Fairchild, he said, was finished. Rock (who holds nearly $500 million of Intel stock today) raised the money nearly instantly. Moore told Grove of the plan one day when they were at a conference in Boulder, Colo. The decision to join his bosses was made...
...rich rewards made possible by some neck-snapping breakthroughs. The key to the success dated back to an insight Moore had in 1965. Sitting down with a piece of log paper and a ruler, he drew a simple graph. On the vertical axis he tracked the growing complexity of silicon chips, along the bottom he ticked off time, and then he plotted the points out a few years. The resulting line, he saw, showed that chip power doubled roughly every 24 months, even as costs fell by half. The rule (amended to 18 months) became known as Moore...
Each transistor on the surface of a silicon chip acts as a switch that can open or close a gate. Computers process information by manipulating sequences of opened and closed gates. A positive charge applied to the gate attracts electrons, allowing current to flow across the gap from the source to the drain. A negative charge stops the current and closes the gate...